Kotn's SS25 Campaign Reclaims the Art of Arab Leisure

Kotn's SS25 campaign doesn't posture or plead. It lives in the dust-light of afternoons, the split watermelon on a street-side chair, the heat-dazed nothingness of a summer too rich to explain. Shot by Dexter Navy, directed by Mariam El Gendy, styled by Zahra Asmail, and designed by Sarah Asmail, ‘Stories of Nothingness from Everywhere’ taps into a frequency few brands dare to tune into: the luxurious clarity of unhurried time.

Founded with a deceptively simple ambition - to create the perfect t-shirt without compromising people or planet - Kotn has sharpened its ethos into a full wardrobe. Certified B-Corp status, sustainable textiles, community investment: the brand’s story is as finely woven as its fabrics. But SS25 pulls even deeper, excavating a cultural pulse that is both fiercely Arab and defiantly global.

"My summers back home felt full and impactful," says Rami Helali, Kotn’s CEO and co-founder. "But when I tried to explain to my western friends what I did, I had nothing to report back. Long, sun-soaked days with friends, sitting around, doing nothing."

Helali paints scenes with the precision of someone who knows what Western timelines can’t measure: "Spending 45 minutes arguing over a bill, with no worries about your next appointment, because generosity is more important than a schedule." The campaign leans into that logic. Abdallah Diab and Bader El Ramly, both artists in their own right, move languidly through frames - shirts undone, bodies loose - inhabiting a world where tea steeps in the scorch of summer.

Helali recalls bargaining with the fakahany (fruit vendor), only for a heated negotiation to end with a shared watermelon and a match on TV. "Fruit isn't only meant to be enjoyed after cutting on a perfect board in your aesthetic house," he says. That ethos - life as it is, not staged for consumption - breathes through the soft tailoring, the dust-muted palettes, the stitched ease of each piece.

Even a casual meet-up carries gravitational pull. "Going to meet your parents at the nady to say a quick hello, that turns into your whole group of friends joining your parents and their friends to sit around, drink juice, smoke shisha, and get roasted about how our team was doing that season," Helali remembers.

Kotn isn't selling a lifestyle but rather it's preserving one. The campaign is a quiet refusal of the hollow productivity that flattens human connection. It’s a study in how ease can be a design principle, how being two hours late is not delinquency but rhythm.

"It's these moments of nothing, of leisure, that make us the richest people in the world," Helali says. SS25 doesn't merely capture that sentiment - it clothes it, houses it, hands it back without apology. Not a dreamscape, but a memoryscape.

Kotn’s ‘Stories of Nothingness from Everywhere’ proves that in a world of endless motion, stillness is a power move.